Alison Bechdel has made a career on ambivalence, giving voice to contradictory impulses simultaneously. Her long-running comic strip, Dykes to Watch Out For, let her work out her political anxieties across a dozen aligned but contradictory personalities, while her graphic memoirs Fun Home and Are You My Mother? are built on the dissonance between the images in the frame and the Bechdel’s words—as well as Bechdel's continual questioning of what she knows, how she’s come to know it, and whether what she remembers holds the same meaning for anyone else who was there. And on a more surface but striking level, Bechdel is an avowed introvert who has articulated her deepest confusions in painstaking and public detail in her three-and-counting accounts of her life.
Her pull to understanding through self-disclosure began early. Bechdel was raised in rural Pennsylvania and began drawing when she was seven. “I learned I could tell stories with drawings. I drew all the time as if it were already my job,” Bechdel says. “When I was 10, I began keeping a diary—my father showed me how to do it—and I completed my first homemade book at age 12: An Odd Collection of Alison Bechdel’s Works.”
Bechdel left home for Oberlin College in Ohio, studying art history and reading philosophy during most of her shifts at the college library. Following graduation, she moved to New York City, taking on “kind of boring jobs” that gave her time to draw; her first steady work as an artist was for the feminist newspaper WomaNews, where she started with single-panel drawings about life as a lesbian in the United States. These eventually developed into the syndicated comic Dykes to Watch Out For, which followed the unfolding lives of a circle of friends in a small college town, filtering the day’s news—the Cold War, the AIDS crisis, the Gulf Wars—through the friends’ lives and love affairs, births and breast cancer, crisis small and profound.
Dykes to Watch Out For ran for 25 years—1983-2008—and was, according to Bechdel’s bio on her website, “a countercultural institution among lesbians and discerning non-lesbians all over the planet.” Ms. Magazine called it “one of the pre-eminent oeuvres in the comics genre, period.” The strip is also responsible for one of Bechdel’s most widely known contributions to popular culture. In the 1985 strip “The Rule”, DTWOF introduced what’s come to be called “The Bechdel Test”, although Bechdel cites her friend Liz Wallace as the inspiration. In the strip, a character says she’ll only see a movie if it has at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man: “Pretty strict.” “No kidding. The last movie I was able to see was Alien.” (Alien ran in theatres in 1979.)
In 2006, Bechdel published Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, a recursive examination of her closeted father’s death when she was 19 and he was 44. She had recently come out to her parents as a lesbian; her father was closeted about his sexual relationships with men. Bechdel—both writer and narrator—were unsure whether her father’s death was a suicide and examined her memories and ephemera from her childhood to find what answers she could. Fun Home was on the New York Times best sellers lists and was a Best Book of the Year by Time, Entertainment Weekly, the New York Times, People, USA Today, the Los Angeles Times, the Village Voice, and the San Francisco Chronicle, among others. The New York Times Book Review called it “the most ingeniously compact, hyper-verbose example of autobiography to have been produced.” Fun Home was adapted into a musical by the playwright Lisa Kron and the composer Jeanine Tesori. It opened at the Public Theatre in 2013 and moved to Broadway in 2015, winning five Tony Awards, including Best Musical.
In 2012, Bechdel published her second memoir (described on the book jacket as “a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery”), Are You My Mother: A Comic Drama, which investigated her relationship with her own mother while tracing Bechdel’s relationship to therapy and the “good-enough mother” theories of 20th century British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott. The response to her second full-length book was laudatory. In a starred review, Kirkus Reviews called it a “psychologically complex, ambitious, illuminating successor to the author’s graphic-memoir masterpiece." Author Jonathan Safran Foer described it this way: “A work of the most humane kind of genius, bravely going right to the heart of things: Why we are who we are. It's also incredibly funny. And visually stunning. And page-turningly addictive. And heartbreaking.”
Bechdel was named a MacArthur “Genius” Fellow in 2014. Her comics have appeared in The New Yorker, Slate, McSweeney’s, The New York Times Book Review, and Granta, and her comic strip work has been collected in numerous volumes, most recently The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For (2008).
In 2021 she published her first book in nearly 10 years, The Secret to Superhuman Strength. In the graphic memoir, Bechdel explored her interest in fitness crazes while addressing such issues as body image, interdependence, and mortality, which The Guardian called “quietly astonishing,” going on to write: “I cannot hope to capture all that this extraordinarily generous and roomy book contains, nor the deftness with which [Bechdel] loosely knots her themes together.”
Bechdel’s work—especially her memoirs—are marked perhaps less by ambivalence exactly than by her pursuit of a rigorous honesty, emotional precision, in the face of memory’s tricks. Self-reflexive and formally inventive, her work is brainy and funny, unflinching and occasionally unflattering, but also always pointing the way towards connection, just the other side of one more mass of contradictory human impulse.
—Adrien-Alice Hansel